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Best Seller
Join Date: Aug 2007
Location: America.
Gender: Male
Posts: 569
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He Looked at his Hands
Sunlight woke him.
Gold ribbons poured like streams of sand into the dark hallow of his room. He shut his eyes, scrunched his nose, and ducked under his blankets, but the morning persisted, its red and orange tints invading the darkness of sleep. He grunted in the way young boys do, and with a fierce tug and twirl enveloped his self in a cocoon of blankets. The sun rose, and the light became stronger, a bloom bleeding through the shades.
He reached for his pillow, found it, and brought it to his face, smothering light and wallowing in the black of sleep. Nets of gold crept along the remainder of shadows and suffocated his attempts to preclude the day. He wriggled away, clinging to the dark corner of his bed. The light, too, reached there.
When the red tints became too much to bare, he threw off his pillow, emerged from his blankets, and let out a long, pensive sigh as he rubbed his eyes. Morning had come. The day would soon begin.
He listened to the clink and clatter of silverware being shifted in the kitchen. A sizzling hiss was followed by a grainy smack, and the deep aroma of fried rice and green beans slipped in from the hallway. He stretched and yawned, moved his head from side to side, and wiggled his toes, counting all ten of them to make sure they were still there—a daily ritual acquired after being told by his brother the story of the toe thieves.
He dropped onto the floor, scratched his truck-pajama behind, and focused all his will on traversing the hall into the kitchen. Early in the morning, this was quite the task to undergo. Still occupied with rubbing the sandman’s magic out of one eye, he looked with his other into the kitchen.
Yuki sat at the small table, two chop sticks in hand and specs of rice sprinkled on his chin. Mom’s hair was held in a pony tail, and he could see the strap of her apron wrapped around her waist. Her elbow rose and fell as she spun a large spoon around the contents of a steaming pot. Yuki saw him first, and waved him over.
Before his bottom touched the seat of the chair, Yuki’s hands were already in a flurry of conversation.
You still got your toes?
He opened his mouth to say something, but considered mom, who looked too tired and too focused to deal with one of his voluble retorts. He knew Yuki could read lips so long as they were aimed his way, but Yuki needn’t say anything to make it known he preferred his own method of speech. So he moved his hands.
All ten.
This seemed to disappoint Yuki, who alleviated this disappointment by lifting a pea pod from his bowl to end its existence with a crunch. He watched, and not without a tinge of contempt, as Yuki looked about the room, as comfortable as he did their home in Japan. Mom noticed him, then.
“Haruko,” she said. “Why aren’t you dressed?”
A bowl of rice was put before him. He reached for chopsticks and took a clump of white into his mouth. His mom silently asked Yuki a question, to which Yuki replied in his manner. Haruko did not see the exchange. He was too engaged in his breakfast.
“Haruko,” his mom said again. “We’re leaving in thirty minutes. Get dressed when you’re done.”
He didn’t answer. He didn’t feel Yuki’s eyes on him. If he had, he would have seen that Yuki knew.
“Haruko!”
“Yes, mom.” Haruko bowed his head forward and scooped up the rice as fast he could, his swipes as urgent as one who does not taste what they eat. Yuki watched him, but Haruko ignored the gaze. He finished the rice, slammed his bowl down, and quickly stepped back to his room.
"Haruko,” his mom called to him halfway. “Are you alright?”
“I have to get dressed, mom!” Haruko closed his door. Inside, he looked around. The house in Japan had been better. He closed his eyes and tried to envision his and Yuki’s old room. The room did not come. He clenched his eyes, scrunched his nose, and pulled in his lips, focusing. But the room did not come. He saw only cut outs of what used to be: their bunk bed, the small desk, the baseball gloves tossed somewhere on the floor, in the corner, in the closet, under the bed, maybe hanging from a hook in the wall. He didn’t know. They’d only been in America for five months and already he was forgetting.
Furious with himself, Haruko quickly dressed and fetched his rainbow colored back pack, slung it over his shoulder, and slipped back into the kitchen. Yuki already had his pack and lunchbox, and mom watched the clock, counting down the minutes before she’d send Yuki in after him.
“You both ready?” his mom asked both of them, looking directly at Yuki as she said it. Haruko said yes. Yuki nodded.
In the van, mom tried her best to cheer them up, saying the words to Yuki in front, but aiming them primarily at Haruko, his head down. They had to stop once to ask two men for directions. Two English speaking men. Haruko watched as his mom struggled to put the right words together, and as the two English men patiently waited for her to press her question forth. Eventually, the two parties reached a middle ground, and his mom said a broken thank you before pulling the car back onto the road. Haruko watched from Yuki’s rearview mirror as the men moved their lips in the same way his mom had. He watched as they laughed. He looked at his hands, which had balled to fists.
“I want both of you to be good, now. Especially you, Haruko.” His mom’s eyes found him in the mirror. “No fighting. I don’t want to get a call that you got into a fight on your first day. Alright?”
Haruko stared at his hands.
“Alright?”
“Yes, mom.”
They came to a stop.
Haruko looked up to see the large building fronted by a sea of emerald grass. Running through center the grass was a wide strip that kids his age and older walked across to two large, double doors. Standing by the door with a white dress that came down to her ankles and a white top that made her look like a woman out of a magazine was the teacher he’d had to meet weeks before. She was a pale blond-haired English woman, but she spoke Japanese, and Haruko would have to follow her for the first weeks. He hated her the moment they’d met.
“Come on,” his mom said, unbuckling her seatbelt. Yuki was already out the door. Haruko hesitated, then took off his own belt.
The woman waved to them as they approached, and laughter broke out between the two women as they spoke about the little things. Haruko stared at a tree planted across the street. He watched the twigs shake as a duet of birds perched onto its thin end. Sometime later, the women stopped talking, and Haruko was told to go off with the pale blonde. Yuki would have to go with someone else, due to his condition. They both waved him off, and his mom told him again, not to cause any trouble, not on the first day.
Haruko huddled close to the woman as they walked the hall, avoiding the eyes of any that might wander over to meet his own. His grip coiled around the handle of his lunchbox, and his other balled itself into a timid fist.
The bell rang, and the hallway became a frenzy of blurred movements, kids running this way or that, teachers ushering in their students before closing the door. The blonde woman smiled at Haruko.
“Everyone here is really nice.” She spoke with an American accent, over punctuating the symbols. “Are you ready?”
Haruko nodded then looked at his feet as they made their way to one of the closed doors. On the other side, he could hear a teacher saying something to their class. The class was quiet with apt attention. The blonde woman opened the door, and Haruko felt a thousand eyes fall on him.
The teacher said something: “--------, ---- -- Haruko, --- hi Haruko.”
The class responded: “Hi, Haruko.” Haruko kept his eyes down.
“Haruko -- ----- -- -- ------- --- ---- ----.”
Haruko looked up and scanned the desks for any other Japanese kids. There were none. There were black boys. There were white boys and white girls. There was an Indian with a hairy mole by his nose. The teacher beckoned to Haruko, and the blonde woman gently nudged him forward. He followed the teacher and found himself seated at a desk in the far back, for which he was thankful. The blonde woman knelt beside him.
“Ok,” she said. “She’s going to give us the lesson and I’m going to help you with it. After today, I’m going to introduce you to your English teachers. That sound fun?”
Haruko nodded, annoyed with the woman’s stupid accent.
The teacher warbled on. Haruko looked out a window on the far left, and thought of his old room, the baseball fields, his friends, his school. He looked at his hands and tried to concentrate. No faces, no images, no voices came.
Last edited by SevenWritez : 04-11-2008 at 04:59 PM.
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